Post Your Comment

34 Comments

From page 2: "Unfortunately, if you're looking for a more potent IGP from either company, you'll want to wait for Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer architectures."

=> While the mainstream version of "Sandy Bridge" will have an IGP (coming in early 2011); AMD's Bulldozer won't.

The one's with IGP are AMD's "Ontario" processor (Bobcat cores), and "Llano" processor (K10.5 based, Athlon II-like configuration + Radeon HD 55xx/56xx-based IGP)...These will be the Fusion processors that AMD will bring to the table in late-2010 and early-2011.

Corrected. I said Bobcat in the other places (AFAIK), but I did mistakenly put Bulldozer in there.

Also worth note is that Bobcat isn't just mobile Bulldozer for a change... it's a real reworking for mobility. In fact, not only is it not like Bulldozer, but it's a pretty major change even from K10.5 and K10. More on this in the near future....Reply

There are currently some leaked slides saying NDA until tommorrow, furthermore AMD is one of the participants of Stanford Hot Chips Conference. In the program material for the conference there is this detail for Tuesday August 24

I've been asking for a Nile platform review and Anandtech delievered! I'm glad that your reviewed the k625 too - it seems like the best Nile option, though the K325 1.3 is not much different. It was a good, balanced review. I've seen this one at Office Depot - it's been at $500.00 more than once now. If only Office Depot carried any color other than red.Thanks!Reply

The link from graphics to conclusion didn't appear for me, not sure if it was just a firefox hiccup or if it's missing.

Anyway, good article. What is really interesting is the difference in graphics performance between the HD 3200 and HD 4225. Is there any underlying architectural difference, because with the same number of shaders I'd assume that the 3200 at 500mhz would beat the 4225 at 380mhz.

While the platform looks nice, i still think 12" is the magical size for an ultraportable. Oh, and if you sent back your U230 and want to get some numbers for it, please message me and I'll be glad to run numbers for you. (I think I run low 40s on average in SC2 with my 3200 turned up to 3300 speeds)Reply

I missed the page title for the LCD, which messed up the links. That's corrected now.

As for the HD 3200 and HD 4225, they're very similar but 4200 series uses UVD2 while 3200 is UVD1. 4000 series is also DX10.1 versus DX10 on the 3200. Per clock performance of the 4200 appears to be higher as well, but I don' t know exactly what changed in that area.

For U230 SC2 numbers, we'd need to send you our test file as well, if we're to keep things apples-to-apples. We did send that one back to MSI, sadly, but I'm not sure if there's much need to retest all the old laptops. We'll be dropping the older stuff from the charts as we move forward and focusing on the newer laptops. Given the pricing and availability, there's not much reason to buy a U230 over the T235D now. I suppose if you want 12", but in that case what you really want is a U230 update with Nile.Reply

well, it'd probably be nice to have a better datapoint for the last generation AMD Ultrathin platform than that turd 'Ferrari One' It would also help us determine if the 4225 is really more powerful than the 3200 or if all those games are just handicapped by the slow Ferarri One processor.

It's completely up to you, If you send the file I'll take out my extra 2gb of RAM and run the benchmark.Reply

per-clock performance of HD3200 and HD4200 is pretty much the same. The difference here (aside possibly from clock - not sure what clock the hd3200 used in the other notebooks were running at) is the platform. Most notably the HT speed, which was limited to HT-800 for Congo platform instead of HT1600 (for the K625). This basically halves the memory bandwidth available to the GPU and as you can guess this has a pretty disastrous effect on performance. Other differences are possible as well (e.g. different sideport memory), I believe some congo designs also ran their (ddr2) memory at a very low clock which could further lower scores though unless it was single channel it shouldn't make much of a difference since the HT-800 limits available gpu memory bandwidth still more. Well it could be a combination of slow memory and slow HT but whatever the case it's a bandwidth problem not architectural differences which make the HD3200 and HD4200 perform differently (unless you had an app which would use DX10.1 features).Reply

I think it is really interesting that older 45nm Intel's like SU7300 score better in battery tests than 32nm Arrandale i7-640um (found in Alienware M11 R2).

Does this have anything to do with differences in peripherals (hard-drive, LCD, etc)? I noticed the Alienware has a 7200 rpm drive whereas the Acer Timeline 1810 has a 520 rpm drive. Or is the battery life difference related more to other factors? (I was expecting 32nm to definitely pull away from 45nm all things being equal).Reply

I don't think most of the components make much of a difference. M11x isn't the most power-friendly implementation of Arrandale ULV, though, so we'll see how the ASUS UL80Jt stacks up next week. In general, though, the IGP in Arrandale is far more potent than the old GMA 4500MHD, and perhaps that's part of the difference.

Intel specs the Arrandale ULV chips at 18W, which includes graphics. The CULV stuff was 10W, but I don't have a clear number on the chipset+IGP. It would appear that the chipset tops out at around 3W-5W for the IGP based on my testing here:http://www.anandtech.com/show/2932/intel-core-2-cu...

Idle power draw on CULV may also be better, for whatever reason. Maybe 32nm has higher leakage, or it's just the number of transistors. I keep thinking the next 32nm parts from Intel will probably show much better power numbers, as this is really their first 32nm part. We'll see later this year with Sandy Bridge I guess.Reply

As usual, the display just kills it all for me. A fine review, I just wish these laptop manufactures would throw us a freakin bone when it comes to some better displays. They're not doing themselves any favors with my pocket book anyway.Reply

I've got a P920 with 5650 review coming, but I do wish the CPU were faster. It's the Toshiba A665D... except the A665D is now discontinued and so my replacement system is the A660D. It's the same notebook but with a 7200RPM HDD AFAICT. Should have that up in the next week or so.Reply

Funny thing is that HP *is* sending us some laptops now... but they're all from the business lines. We're having more difficulty getting the consumer laptops from them, but we hope to have an ENVY 14 sometime soon.Reply

I'm not excited by Toshiba and their implementation. Swirly and cheesy-looking palmrest that I'd never carry into a meeting if I wanted respect. Tons of annoying advertising palmrest stickers I'd need to scrape off and clean before they come off on their own and leave a sticky mess. Toshiba not participating in the AMD/ATI Catalyst program, and finally, Toshiba's penchant for massive bloatware in the form of Toshiba-branded notebook utilities that rob performance and make it difficult for an average user to know what is and isn't necessary.

I'll wait for a version of this platform as implemented by someone else.Reply

Thanks for the review, Jarred. It's nice to have an AMD-based notebook that I can recommend to friends; undoubtedly there will be more aesthetically modest models in the future. This specific model seems particularly well-suited for the college crowd (especially since they'll want a laptop asap and not want to wait for Bobcat). In the future, it would be useful to have temperature data - just a few readings from various parts of the system (i.e. palm rest, underside of chassis) are sufficient. Reply

I tend to only report temperature and noise information if it's out of the norm. This laptop runs pretty close to room temperature most of the time, and even under full load it's never very loud. Give me an hour or so of "warm up" time and I'll report back with specific figures here. :-)Reply

Page six is now updated with temperature and noise data. Note that I'm the only one of our laptop team with an SPL meter and digital thermometer, so we likely won't be able to provide such results on all of our reviews (unless there's enough demand for it that we decide to buy more test equipment).Reply

Granted under 'not supported' it includes: "Toshiba notebooks" - but is that just because Toshiba doesn't participate in certification?

I've got a friend who bought this laptop when the sale started at the beginning of August (and back then it was supposed to end 8/7/10) and would like to help them get their drives updated. And they don't have access to another AMD laptop.Reply

The download for mobile solutions is a 1.1MB utility that checks your laptop model and then allows you to download the full driver set if it's a supported laptop. That means Toshiba laptops come back with a message saying the laptop isn't supported; please contact your notebook manufacturer (or something to that effect). However, I have verified on at least two Toshiba laptops that you can still install the latest drivers (at least 10.7 worked) if you can get the install files elsewhere. (A quick search turned up nada, sadly.)

Also, I don't know if you can just grab the regular Catalyst Control Center, HydraVision Package, and Avivo Package and end up with the same thing as the unified installer. If so, then go that route.Reply